Mohamed Sail not guilty in shooting death of cellphone-seeking Jeremy Cook

Freed of a murder charge, Mohamed Sail walked out of the London courthouse Monday with his mother on his arm and a cellphone glued to his ear.

It was an ironic twist after a trial where he was acquitted by a jury of second-degree murder of Jeremy Cook, 18, a Brampton teen who died trying to retrieve his stolen cellphone in London from Sail, 26, and the late Muhab Sultan, 23, both from Calgary.

Only Sail or Sultan could have fired the .40 calibre bullets into the teenager.

Cook died at the hands of a shooter.

Sultan died fleeing police.

Sail was acquitted.

All over a cellphone.

After two weeks of evidence, the jury was asked if it was convinced “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Sail pulled the trigger.

After less than two hours of deliberations, and that included lunch, the jury of six men and six women found Sail not guilty of the one count he faced.

There was a stunned silence in the courtroom when the verdict was read.

Cook’s parents, who were there with a large group of supporters, sobbed.

Once the jury left, Sail was free to go.

He didn’t want to say anything as he sauntered out the courthouse front doors with his family, but indicated he was happy before returning to his phone conversation.

“Justice has been made,” his mother said joyfully as they made their way away from the building.

After more than two years in custody for her son as he awaited trial, Sail’s mother said they’re heading home to Calgary, far away from what happened in the Shoppers Drug Mart parking lot early June 14, 2015.

It began just down Highbury Avenue in London at the McDonald’s restaurant where Cook and his sister, Kayla, had tracked the phone Cook had left in a cab earlier in the evening to a car at the pick-up window. They’d approached the car, thinking whoever was there would just give back what was rightfully Cook’s.

They didn’t know Sultan had a long criminal record and one of the two men in the car was packing a .40 calibre, semi-automatic prohibited handgun.

After teasing them with the phone, Sultan hit the gas. Kayla was thrown backwards and Cook, who had just begun a carpentry apprenticeship in London, was left hanging onto the car with his feet skidding along the asphalt.

At the parking lot, Sultan would stop, cut the engine and, within seconds of two gunshots, someone was yelling, “drive, drive.”

By then, only three people would have been able to tell with certainty what happened.

Cook was dead in the parking lot.

Sultan, the man Sail travelled with to London from Calgary two weeks earlier, drowned two weeks after the shooting in the Rideau River while fleeing the police.

That left Sail, who really didn’t have to say much of anything. It was Sultan’s suspicious activities in the days following Cook’s death that weighed heavily on the case.

Sultan became the fall guy. Within minutes of the shooting, he crashed the car that Cook had tried to stop. He took a bus to Toronto.

The jury never heard from Sail. His defence team relied heavily on Sultan’s quick exit from London, the text messages from Sultan’s phone where he tried to come up with an alibi and get some money wired to him from his dad, and his final acts of desperation in Ottawa where he was hiding out.

In the moments before he jumped into the fast river, Sultan gave police officers a false name, sped away backwards before righting the car and taking off and finally running off on foot into the river. Those movements, defence lawyer Sharon Jeethan argued in her final submissions, pointed to the actions of a guilty man.

“He was the shooter and he was running for his life,” she said.

What the jury was left with was a man who was seen walking quickly from where the car was dumped, who politely took a cab to a London address, left his wallet behind so he could pay the bill the next day and who turned himself in to London police once there was a warrant issued for his arrest.

Middlesex County Deputy Crown attorney Fraser Ball argued the physical evidence pointed with certainty to Sail as the shooter. He said the bullets came from the passenger side of the car, one from inside and one outside; the casings would have expended to the right; that a man resembling Sultan was outside the car without a gun.

And Sail was caught in a police phone intercept in Alberta a couple months earlier, trying to buy a “Glock 40” — a 40-calibre handgun.